Gulnara Cafar was born and raised in Ganja, Azerbaijan, in a place where old city streets and nature were always close by. That meeting of stone and trees, history and open sky, formed the background of her childhood and still lives inside her work today.

Her mother noticed early that she was different when she held a pencil or brush. She encouraged Gulnara into art lessons, where drawing and painting quickly became the clearest way for her to express her thoughts and emotions. Creativity also ran in the family: her mother loved making things with her hands, so the idea of “creating beauty” was never something distant or elite, it was a normal, daily joy.

For more than fifteen years Gulnara has lived in London. The move added a new layer to her vision: the contrast between her memories of Azerbaijan and the rhythm of a large European city. She works in different media, but always returns to oil on canvas, where she can build slow, deep colour and texture.

Across all her paintings there is a common thread: a love of the world itself. She paints nature, light, bodies and fabrics as different sides of the same desire – to remind people that life is worth enjoying. For Gulnara, art is a way to protect and share a simple but demanding message: do not forget to love life, yourself and the people around you.

The story of “Seven Beauties” entered Gulnara’s life at school, through the poetry of Nizami Ganjavi. The idea stayed with her, and later, when she became known as “the town’s artist”, she was commissioned to paint the Seven Beauties side by side for a large public piece in the city centre, several metres wide. That experience of seeing these women enlarged on the scale of architecture left a strong mark on her imagination.

She has always been fascinated by dresses, fabrics and the way clothing can reveal or hide a person’s inner world. In this series, each Beauty is not just a princess from a story, but a different shape of a woman’s spirit. One woman can carry many “beauties” inside herself – different moods, strengths, wounds and ways of loving.

For Gulnara, real beauty is never just the face or the body. It is character, memory, voice and the courage to live honestly. Through the Seven Beauties she invites viewers to see women not as one fixed image, but as rich, complex beings whose differences are the source of their power. Her mission as an artist is simple and bold: to encourage people to express their own beauty, inner and outer, loudly and without shame, no matter what life has tried to do to them.